slothead said:
Generally with optics like the ones used in the FC200, it just crops pixels on the sensor and narrows the view (rather than optically amplifying it). If that is the case, you can do the same thing by cropping the image in post processing. I concur that in my experience (with my P2V+), narrowing the video mode does not affect the still image format.
This cropping applies to stills, but not to video.
The Vision+ camera's sensor is 4,384 pixels by 3,288 pixels, for a total of 14,414,592 pixels. Lets call that 14 megapixels, with a 4x3 aspect ratio.
When you take a still photo, the resulting images are 4,384 pixels by 3,288 pixels. Every pixel on the sensor ends up as a pixel in the photo. This is true regardless of whether you are in 1080p/wide or 1080p/narrow mode. Those modes apply to video, and not to the stills.
When you take a video, things are a bit more complicated. 1080p video is 1,920 pixels by 1,080 pixels, for a total of 2,073,600. Let's call that 2 megapixels, in a 16x9 aspect ratio. So in video mode, the camera is always 1) ignoring some pixels at the top & bottom, to fit the 16x9 aspect ratio, and 2) downscaling the remaining pixels to the 1,920 x 1,080 video resolution.
Here is where the field of view enters into it. In 1080p/wide mode, the camera samples all of the sensor's pixels*, and downscales them to 1,920 x 1,080 (* = except for the pixels it ignores at the top and bottom). In 1080p/narrow mode, the camera samples a subset of the sensor's pixels, towards the middle of the sensor, and downscales those pixels to 1,920 x 1,080.
I almost always shoot in 1080p/narrow mode, because 1) it tends to look better, and 2) it crops out the pixels near the sensor's edge, which are usually distorted and washed out due to the poor quality of the lens and the sensor.
In short:
1) Still photos always capture the full resolution of the sensor
2) Video always samples and downscales the sensor
3) The angle setting always affects the FPV video you see on your phone, and always affects the video recorded to the MicroSD card, but it never affects the photo images recorded to the MicroSD card.